Enhancing Photos with High Pass Filter

It has been a while since my last post on using texture to enchance your image. Today, i would like to share with you how to utilize Photoshop High Pass filter to bring out the outline and 3D-ness of the image at the same time sharpen the overall image quality.

Why not use Unsharp Mask? well, on a personal note, Unsharp Mask sharpen everything, this includes bringing up noises in the picture. While High Pass work on the edge(outline) of the picture thus it provides the right kind of sharpening suitable to my work.

So, shall we start…. Here’s the original photo of my friend from Johor who visited Penang recently.

Lets open the picture in Photoshop.

Lets duplicate the layer, have the duplicated layer on top of the original layer.

Next, with the layer still selected, go to Filter, then select Other, follow by High Pass.

At the High Pass menu, move the slider to between 2~8 pixels. This is up to you, my personal preference is 8. You can always apply and check, if you dont like it, start again.

Now that you had applied the High Pass filter, lets make some adjustment with the layer properties. First, lets change the property ‘Normal‘ to either Hard Light or Soft Light. There’s no right or wrong here, try it out and see which one work for you. For me i prefer Soft Light.

Oh, one more thing, you can also adjust the slider to change the opacity of the effect. If i use Soft Light, i will usually leave the opacity to 100%.

So, here is the result. Try it out yourself.

more on HDR

Taken around Armenian Street in Penang.

Camera – D5000 with Tamron 17-50 f2.8

PP- photomatix 3 & photoshop CS

Armenian Street [x]

photography imitate art?

Another HDR…

Another HDR after my trip back from Xiamen, China.

Photo was taken at Tan Jetty before my business trip and only now managed to process it through Photomatix & photoshop CS.

18-55mm f3.5~f5.6

+/- 2EV 3 shots taken.

Nikon D5000

If you are interested to know how, i have a simple tutorial here you can follow, you will need to have Photomatix installed in your system.

Check out my previous shot using HDR.

Use texture to enchance your photo in Photoshop

Ok, time for another photoshop tutorial…..Open an image you like to enhance.

Open up a texture file in Photoshop, drag the texture layer into the image above. Resize the texture layer to cover the whole image.This is where the magic happens. Lets change the blend mode of the layer in the layers palette. Blend modes change how one layer interacts with the layer below it. In this case we’ll start with multiply.

That’s how the picture look like now. Let try another blend mode.We will use Overlay as the new blend more now, this will help to lighten up the image. You can always adjust the opacity if you think the image is too bright after the blend more changed.. Next , duplicate a new layer image of the original image and stack it on top of the texture image. Change the blend mode to Soft Light and Opacity to 80%. This will help to tone down the final image.

You can stop here, but to make this more fun, lets import another tecture file into the working canvas.

Move the 2nd texture layer in between the duplicated image and the 1st texture file. Change the blend mode to Overlay and the opacity to 50%. (make the adjustment to see which % suits you the most)

And finally, i had added a Colour Balance adjustment layer and a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to remove the yellow and redness of the image. Of course this is totally up to you…

This is the final image.